Today when inmates in prisons make collect calls or prepaid calls to friends and families through a computer controlled inmate telephone system (ITS), U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,560,323 and 4,935,956, these calls can be relayed to other parties that inmates are forbidden to call, such as overseas, cell phones, payphones, conferences with other inmates in another prison, their crime partners on the outside and known criminal and terrorist elements. Some prison ITS implement xe2x80x9callowed call listsxe2x80x9d that have 10-20 numbers that inmates are permitted to call and that have been approved by the institution. Many prisons do not utilize these lists because of the administrative hassle involved in the approval and ongoing maintenance support.
It is a common industry estimate that 10% of all calls from prisons are 3-way call attempts. A 3-way call is a feature found on most home telephones implemented by depressing the switch hook for about a half second, which sends an electrical wink signal to the serving telephone company central office telling it that a feature is being requested. The inmate is placed on hold while another dial tone is returned to the telephone user who can then dial any location in the world. During the ringing or after the dialed party answers, another depression of the switch hook for about a half second, conferences the 3 parties together. Similarly, if the called party is already in conversation with another party, when the inmate call arrives, the local central office notifies the called party of a call waiting. To answer the call waiting event, a hook-flash is performed on the line. To join all the parties together another hook-flash is performed.
It has been proven that many of these calls are crime related. Many recordings of inmate calls from prisons have been taken to court to help prosecute the inmate for old or new crimes. While prisons may have investigators that monitor and listen to some percentage of calls, it is virtually impossible to monitor all calls with the quantity of prison officials on duty. Therefore, while some criminal inmate calls may be caught, the vast majority of them are not. Citizens suffer the brunt of continued criminal activities conducted over prison phones. Crimes are committed, witnesses harassed, girlfriends and boyfriends harassed, etc.
While virtually every inmate telephone system (ITS) has some form of 3-way call detection feature, real studies have shown that at best, these detection features might be only 30-40% effective contrasted to the 80-90% effectiveness purported by some phone system providers. Some percentage of ITS don""t have 3-way detection because of the age of the ITS or fear of patent lawsuits that are prevalent in the industry. A common occurrence of some ITS systems is that false triggers are generated from normal conversational sounds and from the high background noises of prisons. These false triggers cause lots of complaints from inmates and their families that prisons and providers don""t like to handle. Therefore the feature may be turned off.
Furthermore, inmates know how to defeat the current 3-way detection feature by making loud noises such as coughing, singing, and tapping on the mouthpiece with their fingernails while the feature is being invoked. One system has a xe2x80x9chummingxe2x80x9d problem that easily jams its 3-way detection scheme. They are the world""s greatest xe2x80x9cphone freaksxe2x80x9d and constantly find ways to circumvent controls. Thus the real 3-way call detection percentage is very low.
All of the 3-way patents currently issued rely upon some form of analyzing the audio portion, approximately 300-4000 hertz bandwidth, of the common telephone line that a prison phone call is conducted over by converting the analog signal to a digital domain and performing some algorithm in the digital domainxe2x80x94U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,883,945 5,805,685 5,539,812 5,738,655. Although there may be a unique analog signature caused by the hook-flash event, any other sounds can jam this event if the detector is at the prison site, masking that signature making it indistinguishable. And it is common knowledge inside prisons that they can make noises which prevent the detection of a 3-way call attempt.
There are patents on analyzing the transmission characteristics of a line during the call to determine if they changed significantly enough to determine that a 3rd party was added to the call xe2x80x94U.S. Pat. No 6,141,406. Because the added party may be next door, across town or around the world, setting the thresholds to make a decision can be challenging. Contrast a legal 3rd party addition to having several people at the called party""s location pick up extension phones creating a legal multi-party conversation. These phones may have different terminating impedances depending upon if they are portable, cheap, old or new and can constantly pickup or hang up during the call.
The invention does not analyze the audio portion of the telephone line for 3-way detection. Its advantage is that it is installed at the called party location and can electrically detect a 3-way call attempt by measuring the loss of current for about a half second from the telephone instrument. No inmate noise can prohibit the apparatus from detecting this event. The reliability of detecting the 3-way attempt should therefore be extremely high.
If multiple extension phones are picked up in parallel with the invention phone, electrically, none of the instruments can activate a 3-way event, not even the phone connected to the invention. If the invention phone line is temporarily placed on-hook while one remaining phone performs a 3-way connection, the activation and xe2x80x9cI""m alivexe2x80x9d signal methodology in conjunction with the remote system will detect this event and terminate the call.
While every allowed called party of an inmate who may be required to use the invention, has to have it installed, the invention will be relatively low priced and easy to install. The motivation behind the invention is to prevent continued criminal calls from occurring from prisons, not to make it easy and economical from the prison or service provider perspective. Today""s 3-way call attempt methodologies, for the most part, are unreliable. There are no known released studies that show the statistics of these methodologies. Furthermore, many inmate telephone systems have been installed for 3-6 years and cannot or will not be upgraded to the latest software or hardware releases that may be available for them because of the costs involved. Economics dictates how incarcerated criminal""s communications are controlled, not law enforcement principals.
The U.S. Inspector General performed a study of the Federal Bureau of Prison system in 1999. Some comments were: http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/bopcalls/execsum.htm website.
xe2x80x9c. . . he talked on the telephone xe2x80x9call day longxe2x80x9d and made arrangements for drug deals on the telephone almost every day, including participating in conference calls to Colombia . . . xe2x80x9d
xe2x80x9cThis special review conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that a significant number of federal inmates use prison telephones to commit serious crimes while incarcerated including murder, drug trafficking, and fraud.xe2x80x9d
xe2x80x9cOur interviews, case examinations, data collection, and document review paint a troubling picture of the scope and seriousness of inmate use of prison telephones to engage in criminal activity.
xe2x80x9cOne FBI head said xe2x80x9che believed that when large scale drug dealers serve time . . . all you do is change his address and his phone numberxe2x80x9d by putting him in prison. He stated that drug dealers can conduct business as usual and may even feel a bit more secure behind bars than they do on the street.
With 2,000,000 inmates in about 5,000 U.S. prisons making over 500,000,000 calls a year, 50,000,000 of these calls may be 3-way attempts. This is an incredible quantity of calls that are placed illegally. Even if half are detected and prevented, tens of millions of calls that are not prevented create a lot of uncontrolled crime in this country.
The purpose of the invention is to provide a more secure method of preventing these illegal calls. Not every called party requires an invention to be used because not every inmate is a threat. But with drug and violent criminals comprising about 70% of the inmates nationwide, a disturbing factor is that the recidivism (repeat offender) rate is over 70% for these criminals. This means that 70% will get caught again and go right back to prison, and if the invention can prevent more crimes from being conducted from within prisons, the inconvenience of the distribution of them will be overcome with the high reliability factor of preventing the 3-way criminal calls, hopefully lowering the recidivism rate and protecting our citizens moreover.
The invention is a small electronic unit that connects between a telephone instrument and a common analog telephone line normally at a residence. Whenever the telephone is off-hook, the invention monitors the telephone line for an activation signal from the remote inmate telephone computer system. When it receives this signal, it begins monitoring for a hook-flash event generated by the local telephone that is an indication of a feature event requested from the local telephone exchange, which is an illegal event for inmate calls.
After the call is accepted by the called party, the unit is commanded to begin emitting a xe2x80x9cI""m alivexe2x80x9d signal, that constantly identifies that it is active to the inmate telephone system. The loss of the xe2x80x9cI""m alivexe2x80x9d signal for a short period will trigger a disconnection by the remote system. If a hook-flash is detected during the call, the unit can notify the remote system or disconnect the call or both.